April 13, 2005

Andrea Dworkin, R.I.P.

Andrea Dworkin was part of the coming-of-age of many women of my generation. With her death, much else has also passed away.

Obituary in the NYTimes (registration required), The New York Sun, and a balanced retrospective with some good links in The Guardian.

Jenny Diski, "Oh, Andrea Dworkin: rev. of Misogyny: The Male Malady by David Gilmore, London Review of Books.

The Andrea Dworkin Website, including The Andrea Dworkin Lie Detector and links to Dworkin's writings.

Andrea Dworkin and Catharine A. MacKinnon, "Press Release About Canada"

Wikipedia – first with the news (via Kameron Hurley). More on CultureCat, feministing.com, Pen-Elayne on the Web (and here).

Bloggers take note — Ampersand, blackfeminism.org, Echidne, feministe, Jessica, Christine (some good links), Pinko Feminist Hellcat (excellent links), XX (more good links) — even those with reservations. There are lots of others. She was important.

Some notable posts:

Rad Geek, Andrea Dworkin media blackout lifts, a little, More by and about Andrea Dworkin, May she be at peace: Andrea Dworkin, and Andrea Dworkin does not believe that all heterosexual sex is rape.
Susie Bright, Andrea Dworkin Has Died.
Cleis, In electric memory of Andrea Dworkin.
Flea, Andrea Dworkin, on the "I didn't always agree with her" syndrome.
my name is Andrea. it means manhood or courage at Nyarlathotep's Miscellany (via Echidne)

Some quotable quotes:

"[A] Leon Trotsky of the sex war," according to Punch¹

"Dworkin is one of the few remaining specimens of pure countercultural Romanticism: fierce, melodramatic and utterly convinced that all truth can be found in her own roiling, untempered emotions."²

"She was a warrior."³

"[I]t's tempting to say that if Andrea Dworkin didn't exist, we would have had to invent her.
Which, come to think about it, is exactly what we have done."⁴

E.: It is so hard to write you. Why am I doing it this way, not intending ever to send this letter, still with one eye to publication, a grand concept for a book in some sense, and still with one eye, that poets conscience, to a future which becomes increasingly impossible to imagine. It seems the only way I can bear the passion behind the language, the memory, the desire, the only way not to be burnt up by what I feel. You come over me in waves of memory, especially when I sleep, and I wake up in sweat and trembling, not knowing where I am, not remembering the years that separate us.⁵

¹ Adam Bernstein, Washington Post (Tues. April 12, 2005): B06.

² Laura Miller, Rev. of Heartbreak, The New York Times Book Review (2002).

³ Lisa Jardine on BBC Radio 4’s Today programme.

⁴ Louise Armstrong, "The Trouble with Andrea."

⁵ Andrea Dworkin, First Love: a chapter from an unpublished novel.

(Thanks to Murray Littlejohn for some of this material).

Scribbled at April 13, 2005 10:22 AM AST | Hmmm? (0) | TrackBack (0) | Link Cosmos | More? gender/sexuality, politics




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